Gender: Male
Status: Swinger
Age: 32
Sign: Gemini
City: San Francisco
State: California
Country: US
Signup Date:
12/20/03
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Saturday, August 30, 2008
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Still We Ride
It was kind of sad for me to ride around Justin Herman Plaza yesterday, after all my friends flaked [not counting the ones who've fled the Bay Area], looking for buddies to ride with on Critical Mass. There was a day when I couldn't turn my head in one direction without hearing voices call out my name from every corner. Alas. Time stands still for no one, and it wasn't long before the ride started and I ran into old and new friends alike--I'd just been being impatient, as it turned out.
Big Chris was still out there, keeping it real by handing out flyers about how SF is falling behind cities like NYC, Amsterdam and Berlin in terms of assuring bike safety, and put a name on idea I've always supported--"stop roll." [Note: I ride a bicycle, a motorcycle, and my feet, and I feel that bicycles' right-of-way should supersede all others on account of bikes require the most effort to get going again after a full stop.]
Sunny was reppin' for Mark Sanchez and Jen Angel rolled up behind me right before we hit the endless hill in the Presidio. The funniest exchange I had was with one of Sparki's new room mates though. This was still back on Justin Herman when I was feeling kind of left out and then he and I spotted one another and the conversation went something like this:
Him: Hey, aren't you...?
Me: Yeah! And you're Scott's new room mate.
Him: Right. Didn't we just become friends on facebook?
Me: Mmhm. What's your name again?
Him: Jamie. And yours is...?
Ah yes, the virtual social fabric we weave...Anyway, thanks for riding with me Jaime!
9:47 PM
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Greetings From Bury Park by Sarfraz Manzoor
So I just started reading this book yesterday (Thanks for the recommendation Preeti.) and then my mom called this morning to tell me my dad was crying again because I refuse to get married and have kids, which provided me the perfect opportunity to read these passages to her:
Once a month I would make the three-and-a-half hour train journey back to Luton to see the family but only out of a sense of obligation. I was barely on speaking terms with my father and most of my conversations with my mother were about how I hardly talked to my father. [...] I defined myself in opposition to my father. All that he believed, the values he upheld, the ambitions he cherished I rejected as embarassing and outdated. When he said he was Pakistani, I declared I was British; he was Muslim, I was confused; he believed in family, I championed the individual; he worshipped money, I claimed it meant nothing. I convinced myself that we were so different, the notion that I might have inherited anything from him apalled me. The sooner I could shed my past the better. When I was younger I didn't want to know who my father was because I believed my father had nothing to do with me. How wrong can a son be?
My own father used to be a mail man and I remember sitting in my room on stormy days and praying for his safety (and that of my sisters and me, because he was the only buffer between our mean mean mother and our tender bones.) He used to work a lot of overtime from what I recall, too.
So, the last time I went home I interviewed my parents about their work experiences--how bad the racism they experienced was and that kind of stuff. My dad said he only ever had one problem with one coworker--a white guy who felt like he'd deserved the promotion that my father got. They had some sort of scuffle one day when they were drinking at the bar the mailmen sometimes frequented after work.
A bar? I couldn't believe it. I didn't know my father ever went to bars! "Why pay five dollars for the drink you can have at home for one?" is his attitude. So, all that time when I was at home praying for his safety, for the mean attack dogs on his route to leave him be, for him to find shelter from lightning and flash floods, at least some of that time he was col' kickin' it at the mailman watering hole! But learning that made me happy, for reasons demonstrated by this last quote from Greetings:
Unlike some other Pakistani men my father was not frittering his wages. His only vice was smoking...I am pleased my father smoked; glad that there were some things he did purely for pleasure and only for himself.
So, like Manzoor, I, too, am happy that my father had some private pleasures.
Oh, ok, just one more. This is a memoir about loving Bruce Springsteen as much as it's about growing up Anglo-Paki, so:
At college I discovered Bruce Springsteen. In his music I found a new way to understand my relationship with my father. In "Independence Day" Springsteen sings in the character of a son speaking to his father. Springsteen's father had been a bus driver and he never approved of his son's rock and roll. Springsteen described his father as taciturn and unemotional. I identified. "Independence Day" is the story of a son trying to tell his father that he is now his own man and that the old rules don't apply any more. When Springsteen sings it he doesn't sing with anger, he is not taking any pleasure when he tells his dad that "they ain't gonna do to me what I watched them do to you." What most impressed me was the empathy that Springsteen had for his father...That was what made the song so important; it opened my mind to the pain that my father was feeling and it made me think of what he might have been feeling.
8:21 PM
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The joke is on who?
Last week I finally succumbed to the hype and went to see The Dark Night. (Hey, I was sick, it was playing one block from my house, and I had a pretty girl in tow--how could I say no?) It sucked!
Disclaimer: I have been a movie snob ever since the dawn of time, or at least since Yolim got a drivers license and a job at the River Oaks. (Back in the day, employees could put three friends and family members on some kind of VIP list, so I could always get into the local Landmark Theaters for free WITH a plus one.)
Well, in the past (let's say two) years I've tried to open my mind to more of the dreckish Hollywood output. I'm going to blame Sparki (and even Yolim) for that. In fact, I think it was Yo who IRONICALLY kind of opened my mind to the possibility of "good dreck" when I reluctantly agreed to go see The Matrix with him at the dollar theater at Sharpstown Mall--but only at the dollar theater and only if he paid my way. WHOA, The Matrix was bad ass and I realized maybe it was time to tone down my snobbishness.
Wrong.
I like narratives (whether they be books or movies) for characters. Most of this dreck I speak of is heavy on plot rather than character. The Dark Knight has neither. How many of you have seen it? Did you honestly give a shit about one single character in that 2.5 hour movie? Did you sit on the edge of your seat wondering "What happens next? How will Batman get himself out of THIS bind?"
My money is on "no." It didn't have characters, it had caricatures (no surprise), and it didn't have a plot, it had an emotionally manipulative score playing in the background the whole time.
WHY IS THIS MOVIE SO POPULAR???
But that's not even what I find most disappointing about the film--it's its [note Herb's awesome grammatical dexterity] negative depiction of my favorite mythological character: The Trixter. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, take a look at the page I just linked to--it's got links to a ton of material on the trixter, the wise fool, the coyote.
The Joker is a lame American pop-culture manifestation of that force which sets everything in motion, and his dumb-ass, simple dialog about the nature of chaos is...oh, fuck it. It's been a week and I don't really care that much anymore, but it's time that we as American artists reclaimed this noble fool from the simpletons in Hollywoodland.
Grrr.
[Edit: Ok, the film did have some bad ass vehicles in it--the motorcycle, the Batmobile, the Lamborghini--yum.]
8:19 PM
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Tuesday, March 25, 2008
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pretentious & sanctimonious
This (backdated) blog entry is dedicated to Michael Adair-Kriz who, by tagging me on his blog, has forced me to update and update well. (And since it’s backdated, I won’t discuss the wonderful spring break week-long bed-in I just had with Tish or the motorcycle rides and awesome shows and hikes along the beach to where a stream plunges 500 feet over a bluff and into the ocean.)
Yesterday, in lit class, once again I came off as "that political guy." We were discussing Nobody Nothing Never by Juan Jose Saer, and, well, there’s a pretty glaring omission from that novel which is set in rural Argentina during Argentina’s Dirty War-- that omission being the torture and disappearance of up to 30,000 people.
Now, to his credit, Saer wrote a book that has much more to do with metaphysical notions of time and space than war, and he has every right to write or not write about any topic he chooses. I have no problem with that. And, certainly, this is very much a book that mostly deals with metaphysical notions of time and space--except it also tangentially mentions (here and there, maybe a total of four pages out of a 220 page novel) that there are indeed torture and disappearances of "revolutionaries" (and alleged, i.e. innocent, "revolutionaries") going on. It’s just that nobody’s talking about it and the newspapers aren’t covering it. (Instead, the newspapers and townsfolk are busy discussing and obsessing over a spate of 11 horse murders, even as they admit, after a period of weeks, that they have arrested, imprisoned, and tortured a falsely accused man.)
So, in my reading, because Saer did choose to include those few details which undeniably set his metaphysical treatise in a particular time and particular place where a particularly brutal and oppressive campaign was under way, then it really calls attention to that "omission." It’s not an omission at all.
I could go on here, like how at least eight pages are devoted to a character’s reading/paraphrasing of de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, a device which allows Saer to explore similarities between depictions of torture and pornography, to address why he has chosen to omit graphic renditions of torture. Like Coetzee in Waiting For the Barbarians, he recognizes the potential for a "perverse" sort of erotic pleasure arising from writing or reading detailed scenes of a person exerting the utmost power over the body of another person, thereby placing the author in a somewhat complicit position. Meh, I’m not explaining myself very well. Let me pull a few quotes from that Coetzee article I just linked to (fans of The Battle of Algiers will find mention of it if they read the whole, short Coetzee article):
The torture room thus becomes like the bedchamber of the pornographer’s fantasy where, insulated from moral or physical restraint, one human being is free to exercise his imagination to the limits in the performance of vileness upon the body of another.
[...]
For the writer the deeper problem is not to allow himself to be impaled on the dilemma proposed by the state, namely, either to ignore its obscenities or else to produce representations of them. The true challenge is how not to play the game by the rules of the state, how to establish one’s own authority, how to imagine torture and death on one’s own terms.
But I digress. This post is not about my reading of Nobody Nothing Never (a reading which is corroborated by a bit of knowledge about the "sequel" to it, in which the two main characters from NNN are disappeared.) No, this post is about......me.
I don’t know why, but I continue being amazed by my classmates who (all?) believe that art and literature exist in some rarefied vacuum, floating somewhere above the piss and shit and blood and cum and vomit of the world we live in. In their quest for bollocks about "the universal human experience," they don’t even think to view Saer’s novel within a historical context., let alone examine their own race/class/gender/sexually priviliged or marginalized place in the world. This in a class of seven people, of which I am the only straight male and the other six students are women (one in her 70s and two identify as lesbians). Not exactly the most privileged members of society with an abundance of books describing their experience as "universal." (The teacher, for the record, is an awesome, politically astute gay man who is totally sensitive to race/class/gender/history/etc.)
They remind me of the students in Arun P. Mukherjee’s article "Ideology in the Classroom," wherein she discusses her students’ readings of "The Perfume Sea" by Margaret Laurence.
"Their papers," writes Mukherjee, "gave me an understanding of how their education had allowed them to neutralize the subversive meanings implicit in a piece of good literature."
I’m not going to get into the specifics of Mukherjee’s and her students’ readings of "The Perfume Sea," but she does note her students’ tendency to:
efface the differences between British bureaucrats and British traders, between colonizing whites and colonized blacks, between rich blacks and poor blacks. [This tendency] enabled them to believe that all human beings faced dilemmas similar to the ones faced by the two main characters in the story...Their analysis, I realized, was in the time-honored tradition of that variety of criticism which presents literary works as ’universal.’
So, back to Saer, this novel which is ostensibly "about" some horse murders and primarily "about" metaphysics and tangentially "about" the Dirty War becomes devoid of any political significance in this "universalist" reading. We see moments of time frozen, as when a ball kicked into the air floats, suspended, for pages while it is examined and reexamined from multiple angles. We see water gushing out of a spigot and then the drops freezie in midair as their shadows and bits of light refracted through them are examined in close detail. But we don’t ever, not for the slightest moment (as readers), consider how the falsely accused man being tortured experiences time.
Wow, that was a really long set-up for what was supposed to be a joke.
So, after class I went out for dinner with Kian (who is not in that class), and complained to him about exactly what I’ve just complained to you about. As we stood there waiting for our table, I turned to him and asked, "Do you think I’m pretentious and sanctimonious?"
Before he even had a chance to answer, I looked at him and added, "The fact that I used the second word pretty much proves the first, doesn’t it?"
"Don’t answer that," I laughed.
This has turned into a very long post and I haven’t even gotten around to writing about my first experience practice-teaching. I’ll just say this, for now--I went in there intending to play some Jimmy Cliff [lyrics] and Peter Tosh [lyrics] (because they were on the syllabus, along with a critical essay on the oral tradition) and the professor I TA for wound up insisting that I play Dead Prez [lyrics].
That’s right. I went in to meet her before class to go over my plans one last time and told her I planned on maybe making the lesson a little more relevant (or familiar, at least) to the students by making mention of a contemporary rap group who address some of the themes from the readings (and who even allude, explicitly, to Peter Tosh in that song). Well, just mentioning Dead Prez wasn’t enough for her, especially when she found out I had my computer in my bag and the song on my computer.
"What kind of computer do you have?" she asked, thinking of the A/V setup in the classroom. "Do you have a Mac? No? We could still hook up your pc. Why don’t you email it to yourself so we can download it onto the classroom computer?" Etc. I’m not exaggerating one bit--she insisted I take my computer out right then and there, in her office before we even headed over to the other building where the classroom was, and email it to myself immediately.
And that’s how I played Dead Prez in the classroom the very first time I taught. (Overall, I think I did a pretty bad job teaching, but I guess that’s common. My friends Jenn and Kerry have taken/are taking a "Teaching Creative Writing" class in which they practice-teach and they both had the same experience I did--trying to fit too much material into too little time.)
Wow, this has gone on for a long time and I really need to get to work on my own fiction, which is due in about 15 hours, but I have to close by saying that ALL art is political art and IF YOU ARE NOT EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO, then you are (at least implicitly) supporting the status quo.
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Currently
listening
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Swordfishtrombones
By
Tom Waits
Release date: 15 June, 1990
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4:11 AM
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Friday, February 29, 2008
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Happy Leap Day!
First of all, hats off to the Billboard Liberation Front for another fine action.
Four years ago I’d been in Houston for about three months and hated my life. I had left San Francisco just after Halloween to kick dope and apply to graduate school. The Shins’ Chutes Too Narrow had come out recently and was in heavy rotation.
"Go back to your home town / Get your feet on the ground / and stop floating around..."
and
"You want to jump and dance / but you sat on your hands / and missed your only chance..."
My grad school applications were in and I did not want to get too settled because I did not intend to stick around long. I meant to head out to wherever-I-would-start-grad-school-in-the-fall by summertime. I didn’t want to bother making friends I’d soon abandon, but geeking out on IM and email and talking to my friends in NYC and SF was getting old--I was lonely.
That’s the context in which I got an email from my friend Carvell. His band was playing as part of the Clamor Magazine music festival in Oakland. Not only that, the Clamor Music Festival was nationwide, in like 38 cities or something. So I checked Clamor’s website and indeed, there was a show in Houston, at a place called the Mausoleum. Not only that, a band I’d been into some years prior, a band I’d gone to see at the Knitting Factory back in the day in NYC, the Free Radicals, were playing. Plus, it was a benefit for Houston Indymedia, so I figured I could plug into the local anarchist scene, make some friends, who knew, maybe even get laid.
That turned out to be the night I first met many people who would turn out to be some of my favorite bad ass hellraisers. Talk about not wanting to make friends I’d soon abandon--the cute nerdy girl who worked the door would turn out to be my longest-term lover to date. And I picked up a flyer for a Leap Day Reclaim the Streets the next day.
"It’s your extra day," it read. "What are you going to do with it?"
I had been planning on going to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, that’s what, but I thought I’d be able to do both. It was a rainy Sunday, I think. The party was going to be outdoors, but despite the rain, I wasn’t going to miss it.
I got to the church where the meeting was supposed to be and nobody was there. Turned out I’d come an hour early, and now I wasn’t so sure that I was going to be able to make it in time for the party after the meeting. So I ditched the meeting, and that turned out to be the right decision because it led me to the people who actually made me want to clean up.
I drove up to a traffic island in the Montrose. Some punks had strung Christmas lights (powered by a car battery) on a tree, and they were digging up soil in the rain. Planting flowers and melons--guerilla gardening. I met Travis that night--we started off by talking film. Jose and Rolando were there, as was Tish and Kayte and Sparki. Not sure who else.
That’s what I did on my last Leap Day. Today I’m going to work, then meeting my advisor, then Critical Mass. Xtra Action Marching Band is playing later. Who knows...?
Happy Leap Day, dear readers.
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Currently
listening
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Icky Thump
By
The White Stripes
Release date: 19 June, 2007
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10:29 AM
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Friday, February 08, 2008
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t&a
Tomorrow is the first day of classes, which means it's my first day teaching assistanting. (There is no good verb for that.)
Everyone's been axxing if I'm nervous. I'm really not, but I think it's because I don't really understand the challenges that lie ahead. (Ignorance is bliss...) Doot doot doot. La la la. It's like being the teacher's pet, right? Comes natural to me. Nothing to worry about.
Except...
You see, I've always had the luxury/confidence/privilege to pretty open and unrelenting about who I am and what I do. (I'm sure this has much to do with the fact that I was the only freak with a bun on his head all through elementary school.) Pretty much the only thing I ever lied about was drugs, and I don't even hide that anymore, now that the worst is behind me. (One of the luxuries of being an artist is that to do a really good job you're expected to be a depraved libertine.)
But now...now there's kids involved. A potential academic career. And kids...with lots of free time and high-speed internet...My goose is cooked.
What if they stalk me online? It's not like nobody's ever done it before. (I know you're out there!) It's not like I've ever used an anonymous handle in the many places I go trolling. It's not like I don't let my sordid junk hang out all over the place. It's not like I have a reputation to maintain! (Stupid MySpace broken link mofo! http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/004972.html[insert number sign]comment189891 )
I mean, it's post-colonial lit that I'm TAing, so I'd be negligent if I didn't point them to these seminal Sepia Mutiny posts. Then, all my comments on SM point back to my LiveJournal and you see my predicament. (Not to mention the other disreputable forums I hang my hat in.)
Shit. (I mean "shoot!") So this is why people choose avatars and pseudonyms....
In other news, I went to see Juno tonight. It was a good, solid, well-made movie, I suppose, but I don't see what all the hype is about. (Is it just me or is everybody talking about how great this movie is?) The girl who plays Juno and Justin Bateman were great, really awesome, and so were all the other characters. The soundtrack by the Moldy Peaches was fantastic. I cried. But was it a "must see?" Not for me. For one thing, the writers were trying WAY too hard on the hip dialog.
The reason I tell you this is not to take issue with the hype surrounding Juno, though, but to lambast the stoned moran who enthusiastically shouted "yes" and "peace is good" through the preview for what looks like an awful movie about the similarities between shalom and salaam. (It's no West Bank Story, I'll tell you that much.)
Stupid moran. Consider yourself lambasted.
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Currently
listening
:
Distortion
By
Magnetic Fields
Release date: 15 January, 2008
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11:13 AM
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
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Get Stoopid
Today I had some Hyphy Juice for some pick me up** and to indulge my new hobby--collecting cans/posters/promotional materials for local energy drinks. It all started when I noticed a poster for Hunid Racks in my San Francisco neighborhood. That's right, my 'hood has it's own damn energy drink--how you like me now? Naturally, my only option was to take the poster, find a store that sold the stuff, and build an altar in my apartment. So I was back in Houston a couple weeks ago when I spotted a poster for something called "Drank - The Anti-Energy Drink." Yup, my hometown's got it's own answer to the energy drink phenomenon, too, and it's ANTI-energy. The store was sold out so I convinced the man to let me take the poster. A few days later I finally found a store that had it in stock. It's a strange purple brew containing rose hips, melatonin, and valerian root. The poster bears a warning: "This beverage may be extremely relaxing and calming and may cause one to lean." No shit--I am not making this up.
Meanwhile, I'm running out of room in my apartment for these altars. Maybe I'll rotate them.
**There is an abandoned Amtrak station in that video. I went to a renegade circus there once. What a space! (No, really, it was beautiful.)
1:27 AM
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008
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I’m on a roll
I've posted to this thing two days in a row now, so why stop there. Here it is, my Statement of Intent:
I once traded my soul for an Ayn Rand novel and soon found myself at the 1992 Republican National Convention—a turban-headed token on the Astrodome jumbotron—cheering for Patrick J. Buchanan. Cheering, yes, for Pat Buchanan's "Culture War" and his vision of an exclusive America. My short-lived fervor for the GOP was followed by many years of cynical apathy, until Kurt Vonnegut finally restored my hope and sanity. I offer this tale as an example to anybody who doubts the power of fiction to sway minds.
"Activist" is a bad word these days. We hear disparaging news reports about "activist judges" and "activist shareholders," as if passivity were an infallible virtue. Well, my name is Herb and I am an activist fiction writer. I took Harold Pinter's admonishment for artists to accept their social responsibility in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech to heart. I want to tell stories that effect people to move, or at the very least, to think and talk about how we relate to each other and our world. To that end, I am working on my first novel (untitled) as part of my MFA thesis at the University of San Francisco. This piece attempts to shine a light on American Sikhs and put a human face on the generic "protestors" who are too often dismissed as ill-informed malcontents in the mainstream media. My fragmented post-modern picaro Jazz (Jasbir) has left his career of photographing faux-fruit-laden designer china on Madison Avenue to arrive back, broke, in his hometown of Houston. The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is being impeached; Enron's new (tax-payer funded) stadium is the lynchpin in a massive urban renewal project; the big protest at the WTO meeting in Seattle is still in its planning stages; and a shady mafioso named Scorpion from Jazz's old gurudwara (Sikh temple) owns the hottest nightclub in town. Despite the boom-time economy, Jazz waits on Deepak Chopra-reading day traders at a corporate chain restaurant until Scorpion offers him a job doing guerilla marketing for his nightclub. Jazz's love interest, a "Mary Sue" character (to borrow a term from fan fiction), concurrently draws Jazz into her carnivalesque band of anarchist pranksters who wreak havoc on the local malls and SUVs. Jazz's first-person narrative is situated within a montage of other popular, primary texts such as press releases, newspaper articles, community newsletters, a story in the form of a pornographic Penthouse Forum letter, a story in the form of fan fiction, recipes and rap songs. I see my novel as a contemporary revision of The Great Gatsby and Brian de Palma's film Scarface for its portrayal of a ruthless (yet charming) businessman who is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve "the American Dream." Because of my novel's depiction of affluent ennui and decadent nihilism in a minimalist prose and narrative style, I sometimes describe it as an updated Less Than Zero (by Bret Easton Ellis), which is, in my reading, an updated Play it as it Lays (by Joan Didion). In its portrayal of a Sikh community staking its claim on Generican-ness, it draws on a long tradition of hyphen-American writers including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, John Okada, Philip Roth, Rudolfo Anaya, Amy Tan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee, Jessica Hagedorn, Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie. For its meta-fictional pastiche-style and pop-culture appropriations I owe a debt to Donald Barthelme, Colson Whitehead, and Italo Calvino. And the moments when characters "break the fourth wall" to address the reader directly or acknowledge their existence as characters in a work of fiction are a tip of my hat to the plays of Luigi Pirandello and Thornton Wilder. I am currently excited to read the work of Ishmael Reed and Toni Cade Bambara because I expect to find much affinity with these writers for their political engagement and, in Reed's case, his playfulness and knack for absurdity. I like J.M. Coetzee for his formal experiments and his weaving ethical arguments into the body of his novels through "Socratic Dialogues." Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle and Han Ong's Fixer Chao are two recent satires I strive to emulate, both for their scathing wit and heart-wrenching gravitas. Finally, naturally, my work falls within the rich purview of English-language South Asian literature, and within that tradition I feel most closely aligned with Hanif Kureishi. Like Kureishi, I explore regional (Punjabis vs. Gujratis vs. Pakistanis) and class (recent immigrants vs. more established immigrants vs. their American-born brats) distinctions within what is often presented as a monolithic "model minority," and my characters explore (some depraved and deviant) American subcultural identities. My story "Applied Algebra" (after Donald Barthelme) appears in the USF online literary magazine Switchback, and on the basis of that I was chosen to represent my program at the 2007 LitQuake Festival in San Francisco. The Babylon Salon has invited me to be a featured reader at their next quarterly reading. Last fall, in the spirit of "do-it-yourself," my classmate and I inaugurated a new literary 'zine in our program, which we call Segment. This spring (2008) I will TA an undergraduate course in Post-Colonial Literature with Professor Tracy Seeley. I would like to use this experience as a springboard into a teaching career. I will complete a first-draft of my novel by the time I wrap up my MFA program in August 2008. Following that, I would like to compose at least one subsequent draft while living in Houston--I need to inhabit the same space as my characters while actively working on this project. At the same time, I do fear getting mired in the cultural bog that is Houston, so I see your program (and its affiliates Nuestra Palabra and inprint) as a swath of higher, drier ground on what can feel like a suffocating landscape. I look forward to talking -isms with Tony Hoagland and swapping recipes with Ms. Divakaruni. I hope you agree that the Creative Writing Program and I both have much to gain from one another.
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Currently
listening
:
The Paisley Reich
By
Times New Viking
Release date: 13 February, 2007
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1:17 AM
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Friday, December 21, 2007
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Merry Solstice
This is from a few weeks ago. I posted it on my other (nearly) identical blog but not here.
I just lost $40 at the craps table in a casino at an Indian reservation in Louisiana. Shoulda quit while I was ahead. My dad came out a dollar ahead on the slot machines. Despite the fact that my DOUBLE scotch and soda had about a half-count of scotch and FOUNTAIN six count of soda, I saw a drunk lady fall off her barstool. The maintenance-man (who was hovering about the bar trying to decide which broken slot machine to fix first) radioed for EMTs, then radioed in to inform his supervisor that more than one slot machine at the bar was broke. The bartender who was doing a great job of ignoring everybody finally served the person next to me (who hadn't been waiting nearly as long as I had) before calling for EMTs himself. Then he informed the pushy lady beside me that I'd been waiting longer than her and served me my slightly-flavored soda water, which, to his credit, only cost a dollar. The EMTs never arrived and the drunk lady's friends got her a Coke before they helped her back onto her stool. The background noise was like Brian Eno goes to The Price is Right, and more lightbulbs blazed in the joint than at a chandelier convention.
I arrived in town last Thursday for T's birthday. My mother is not speaking to me. She is also not speaking to either of my two sisters (I'm the youngest of three), both of whom arrive on the 28th. My eldest, Scientologist sister does not want to stay at my parents' house because she feels unwelcome by my mother. My father and I tried to explain to her that we, ourselves, are not exactly welcome either, and that doesn't stop US. She (eldest sister) also doesn't want to see my middle sister because middle sister is a psychologist and Scientologists hate psychologists. To top it all off, I learned from my middle sister's best friend that my middle sister hates our eldest sister for having always been a bitch to her, and recently realized that she needs therapy to deal with her crap childhood. Meanwhile, I've decided that I hate them all. On the bright side, I've come out here to Wheezyanna with my pops, having finally realized that the only place I can spend quality time with him is in the car. We went up to Dallas on Monday where he met with a really cool cat who owns an Econo Lodge. (I arrived for T's birthday last Thursday, but my parents' think I arrived on Monday. They still don't know this--this is not why my mother quit speaking to me. She quit speaking to me several weeks ago while I was still back in SF.) Tonight, I had to tear myself away from T&I and I's new DanceDanceRevolution Christmas present to brave rush-hour Houston traffic back out to my folks' house in the 'burbs so me and Pops could come check out a couple more motels he's going to list. At least Pops is cool. Along the way, I was dismayed to see the disappearance of BFE, the site of my many infamous renegade parties, but T is right to point out that such is the nature of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. ( Here are the effigies of me and Sparki that were burned at BFE on Guy Fawkes Night after we'd both moved.) We stopped at a gas station that sold NRG Potato Chips (with Taurine, Caffeine, and B-Vitamins). Speaking of Wheezyanna, did anybody hear the BX I produced yesterday about Sepia Mutiny? I really, really hate to feature myself in media I produce (the 'zine I just made with Pete at USF did not feature a lick of my own work, for example--it's just so slimy to overtly self-promote that way) but I also read an excerpt of my novel. (For the record, this is how it went down. I went to a party on Saturday hosted by some of my BX friends. One of them told me they were short on ideas for the holiday lull and invited me to read, partly as filler and partly because she's genuinely interested. Then another collective-member arrived and informed us that he'd lined up Amardeep from Sepia Mutiny. At that point, being the Sepia stalker that I've become, gears started turning in my head and I volunteered to produce the show, but given the cross promotion with SM, I would be a fool to pass up those ears. So I read. My own stuff. What can I say? I am an opportunistic bastard. An opportunistic Motherless Child.) Wow, it's getting late. It's nearly 6 am. The motel breakfast bar will open in 40 minutes. I'm really glad for this alone time. My dad plans to wake up in three hours. I've had so many thoughts of other things I wanted to blog about over the course of the night, like how protective I feel of my turbaned/bearded dad when we go in places like trashy casinos and rural gas stations and the associated guilt of coming from a nation of people who pride themselves in looking different whose look I've rejected on ideological grounds, and how the birds are waking up outside while the people in the beat-up cars leaving the casino parking lot probably think I'm some sort of annoying early-bird when really I've just stepped out for a smoke because I finally ran out of Jack Daniels. I don't know if I should flip the switch on the motel coffee-maker or go for a walk and watch the sun rise over the swamps on this, the first day of winter, or try to catch as many winks as I can squeeze in at this impossible hour to fully milk the day I'll have with my dad tomorrow (though he'll certainly understand when I tell him I stayed up all night reading and writing--he's awesome supportive like that). And finally, the romantic in me wants to look back on this day two years ago and discuss the significance, but I'll say bye for now instead and maybe switch this to the analog journal. Bye!
1:09 AM
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
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punned it maharaj
According to the Annals of Internal Medicine, there is a rash of nasty new staph infections rampaging the SF gay community. Researcher Mr. Diep at UCSF says the best way to avoid it is to scrub your staff with soap and water.
Meanwhile, due to a shortage of Brizilian cows' intenstines, a sausage shortage looms on the horizon in Switzerland which threatens to upset soccer fans this summer. Globalization and its discontents, indeed...
There is, however, good news for freegans.
I am so immature and willing to do fuck-all to procrastinate.
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Currently
listening
:
Preparations
By
Prefuse 73
Release date: 23 October, 2007
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